4 Tips to get the most out of StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is one such place where a click on the “Stumble” button will let you know about everything around the web ranging from funny jokes to useful apps. However, a majority of the bloggers tend to use twitter and facebook to drive huge amounts of traffic while very few try to do the same with other social networks. In this article, I’ll provide some tweaks and tips so that you can make the best out of StumbleUpon!

SHOW YOUR FACE

Well, it’s very important that you show people, who you are and what your interests are. I find it strange when I see people who do not care to add a profile picture on sites like Twitter, StumbleUpon, etc… These sites are all about being real. So, I strongly suggest you to post a real image rather than cartoons/caricature to show some individuality.
Many people are not going to follow you, just because you are not ready to show your true identity. To be frank, I made the same mistake did/do, but from the day I changed my profile picture I’m able to see gradual increase in the amount of people following me. Seriously, that simple worthless task did miracles. So, why not you try the same?

ADD A CATCHY INTRO

The next spotlight would be a catchy intro about yourself. It’s very important that you maintain a simple but clear intro about yourself that states your interests. It’s a little different from your normal “About me” page because you’ll need to fit in every possible info about you in not more than 3 lines. No one is ready to read anything above 3 or 4 lines. May be I should use the Docomo tag line here – “Keep it simple, silly!”
Have a look at the description below “Man behind Shoutmeloud” – scroll to the end of the page. That’s a very good example of what I mentioned above – simple intro with interests and links to connect with other social networks (he’s forgotten StumbleUpon, nevertheless you can add one).

GET PEOPLE TO FOLLOW YOU

Unlike Facebook or Twitter, getting people to follow you on StumbleUpon is not an easy task. To make people follow you on StumbleUpon, there’s only one way to do it – by providing quality content. It’s obvious that people should be able to find you so as to follow you. This will not happen with one or two stumbles that you make on your blog.
Believe it or not, “About” page will be one among the top 10 that receives more traffic on your blog. So, I’ll have to refer to the previous point again – ensuring a proper “About me” page with links to connect on various networks including StumbleUpon shall be the ideal method to get more followers. I’ll give you another idea too – add a link to your StumbleUpon profile on the author info box that appears below each of your articles and try the same with your guest articles on other blogs too.

MAINTAIN A GOOD FOLLOWING/FOLLOWERS RATIO

Last but not the least, you need to maintain a good following to followers ratio. Unlike twitter where you can follow a lot more people, StumbleUpon offers only 500 people to follow. So, it’s very important that you unfollow inactive or least active users . Secondly, maintain a relevancy in following people. There’s no use in following people who write about making crafts and candles while your interests are blogging and marketing. So, follow stumblers with similarity greater than 35%.

So, it’ll take some time and effort to make the best out of StumbleUpon. I just shared few tips that I learn’t out of my experience with StumbleUpon. You can share your opinions as well, via comments! Don’t forget to stumble up and share this post with your stumble upon friends.

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I'm Mukund, the founder of Everything About Blogging. I'm a freelance writer on topics related to Website Optimization (SEO), blogger customizations and making money online. I'm blogging since 2008 and I'm currently a guest blogger on Shoutmeloud & Blogging With Success.

Nice tips. StumbleUpon is really a nice tool to drive traffic. One can really drive huge traffic if you learn to use it well. Most bloggers don’t tend to pay much attention to this tool and just keep on spending their whole promotional effort in Fb and twitter.

@Maninder: Thanks for the comment! Yes! Since sharing and getting traffic is quite simple via twitter and Facebook, people tend to choose them!

@Aamir: Just try the above mentioned tips! I bet you’ll see an increase in your traffic! At least, tweet using su.pr! It’ll do some magic.. Lol:)

@sureshpeters: Not to a great extent unless you are very popular in your niche!

@rakesh kumar: Yes! I’ll try to come up with an article using digg, as well! Make sure you start using Google+ too!

@Sandeep: Your right Sandeep! It’s possible to drive a huge amount of traffic via StumbleUpon provided you spend some time daily on it!

@KBharath: As I mentioned in the article, provide unique content. Secondly, include a link to your StumbleUpon profile everywhere you can – emails you send to your blogging friends, about me page, share the link on fb.

Hi,
if anyone knows if Stumbleupon has an API which could allow me to know if a user A follows a user B like with Twitter or Digg I would appereciate to know the link. I know that I can do a workaround but if the API does exist, it’s better 😉

Nice and helpful article. I have started using Stumbleupon from the last week and it is really hard to understand how it works to get more traffic. Now, I’ll surely gonna try your mentioned tips. Thanks 🙂